Fonts, as the term is customarily used, are styles of character sets (glyphs) of various typefaces. The characters of the sets may include letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and other ideograms and symbols. For example, a typeface “Arial”, may include fonts that are designated “bold”, “italics”, “roman”, etc., each of which may include stylized letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc., of different sizes.
In the context of computer systems, fonts, or perhaps more properly font files, are data files that contain the set of glyphs or other symbols. Such font files come in a variety of forms, including bitmap fonts, in which each of the glyphs and other symbols, are represented by a series of dots or pixels when displayed on a computer display; outline or vector fonts, which are represented as instructions to the computer system for drawing the glyphs and other symbols; and stroke fonts, which use different forms of information to convey the information needed for the computer to properly display the various glyphs and symbols. TrueType™ fonts, commonly used in connection with various computer software applications, are a form of vector font.
Whether for artistic or other reasons, a web site designer will often employ specific fonts for particular text within a web page. That is, the designer will create the web page (which is really a set of instructions to be executed by a computer software application, for example a web browser), so that particular text on the page is to displayed in a specific typeface of a specific (or sometimes relative) size and with certain effects. Until recently, the designer's goal of having the web page rendered with the intended font when viewed by a user would only be achieved if the user's computer system had a copy of the proper font file installed locally. Absent such a locally installed font file, the web page would be rendered using a replacement font (often decided based on established default settings for the web browser or user-specified preferences for such instances) or might not be displayed at all (or at least in part not at all).
To avoid such situations, web designers had to resort to instantiating text as images in order to preserve the intended font. While such images allowed for web browser to accurately reproduce the artistic or other effects that the web designer was seeking to attain when a web browser rendered the subject web page, it created unintended problems. One such problem is that, in some cases, it made the web pages larger (in terms of file size) and, consequently, the web pages may have taken longer to download to a browser than would otherwise be the case if images were not present. Further, because the text was now embedded in an image file, it was often not searchable by web crawlers and other agents associated with search engines and the like. Hence, the web page may go unnoticed by web browsers since it would not appear in search results for queries seeking the very information to which the image-based text pertains.
More recently, web browsers were enhanced to be able to download font files which might not otherwise be present on a host computer system. Accordingly, web designers were able to include instructions in web pages which directed a web browser to download from the web site hosting the web page those font files necessary to render the web page in the manner intended by the web designer. This scheme was not without problems. For example, it required the user to employ a web browser that supported the font file(s) to be downloaded. Moreover, it created an environment in which the font files were vulnerable to unlicensed proliferation.
The font files used by web designers are typically not created by those web designers. Instead, the font files (or more generally the typefaces which are the basis of the font files) are created by typeface designers and the font files are subsequently licensed by the typeface designers (or their agents) to the web designers and others (e.g., computer software developers) for use in connection with designated activities. Allowing web browsers to download font files whenever the browsers encounter new web pages that employ fonts not currently supported by the browsers could soon lead to a situation where a user (or web browser) has access to all of the font files it needs and so eliminates licensing opportunities for the typeface designers. Accordingly, such schemes are not favored by typeface designers.